


Failure No. 99

by ApprenticedMagician



Series: 2014 BBC Merlin Fest [4]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Arthur is emotionally awkward and cannot handle, Hugs, Minor Character Death, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 05:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10073300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApprenticedMagician/pseuds/ApprenticedMagician
Summary: Hunith is dead, her body cold and buried before the messenger could even pass the castle gates. Arthur is left adrift and unsure and Merlin is barely holding it together.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is the last entry for this series. The prompt was 'Merlin and Arthur' so I looked at the similarities between them and chose the most angsty - their shared experience of lacking a parent and dealing with their deaths.

Merlin looked awful.

Normally, Arthur would give voice to such a thought. But not today.

Merlin stood as Arthur approached and it genuinely surprised Arthur that he’d spare the effort. Merlin had spent hours sitting in the snow on a fallen tree that edged Ealdor’s pastures. If Arthur hadn’t watched him fall into bed the night before, he would have wondered if Merlin had slept right there outside (and maybe he had – Arthur didn’t manage to keep watch until Merlin fell asleep). He turned away and began ambling into the bare trees behind him and Arthur paused in his stride, suddenly unsure if Merlin wanted to see him at all.

Merlin’s hair was stood on end in tattered clumps, as though he had run his hands through it and it had frozen that way; his eyes were avoiding Arthur’s but he could see they were lacklustre and had dark bags underneath them; his skin was as pale as it ever was but tinged with a sickly blue this morning, as though he hadn’t been keeping himself warm. That, at least, Arthur knew for a fact. The idiot was shivering, probably because he had left his coat draped over Arthur in the hut.

The anger that surged through him would have been welcome if Arthur could see a use for it. As it was, he’d rather be filled with sorrow, compassion, empathy – _anything_ but this ever-present fury for the pain that Merlin forced upon himself for a crime he never committed, rage for the way he was using his service of Arthur to pay penance for it. He was utterly helpless though. A king of a realm with the power of what ten thousand loyal men or more could accomplish and it mattered not at all. Merlin wouldn’t let him in. Merlin had never responded well to Arthur’s help when he needed it. In this case, Arthur was willing to accept, no matter how infuriating, that his brand of help and the power he could access was ill-suited to whatever Merlin might need.

Arthur had never known his mother, after all. True, his love for Ygraine was honest and her death had hurt him anew every time he was reminded that he and his father’s features shared nothing in common. But her life wasn’t something he had known. Her embrace was a once-felt phantom, her voice a mere imagining by now. Merlin did not have that same luxury of never knowing and so he felt Hunith’s death deeply and personally and it cut him up in ways that Arthur had never seen a man be cut before.

Merlin was almost out of sight when he looked back, just over his shoulder, eyes dull and empty but seeming to ask Arthur to follow anyway. Only when Arthur risked a step towards him did Merlin face forward again, leading Arthur somewhere hidden.

“I couldn’t talk to you there,” he explained a little later, voice hollow and anguished as though he had been crying. “Not where Will and I had our last real conversation.”

“I’m not sure I want to talk,” Arthur confessed, still angry and becoming disturbed how Merlin still wouldn’t look him in the eye.

“You must have something you want to say,” Merlin rasped. “I’ve never known you to be speechless. Morgana was, perhaps, the only exception.”

Arthur wondered just how lost and alone Merlin felt, if he had resorted to reminiscing about the years when Morgana had still been a friend to them. Arthur was suddenly struck by the worry that this proposed trip to Ealdor was more harmful than healing. He had meant for it to be healing – time away from the castle, open space to breathe, a chance to receive condolences from Hunith’s neighbours and collecting her things before they were distributed or sold. Arthur had granted Merlin a month’s leave without a second thought when Merlin first came to him the news a fortnight ago. He had seen hurt and despair in Merlin’s eyes then but he had assumed it stemmed from... well, from the… _obvious_ source of distress. But Merlin wouldn’t leave and claimed his place was with Arthur so Arthur had saddled up to accompany him back home after Gwen encouraged the idea.

The entire trip Merlin had looked out for Arthur’s every need and comfort: offering him food or blankets, building up the fire, warning him about puddles or holes on the road, staying up late to keep watch, mending tears to his clothes as soon as they happened, examining his sword for nicks or smudges of any kind. All Merlin had talked about on the trip were the problems Camelot was facing with adjusting trade routes or taxing a town under drought or how the new recruits were doing in training or the challenges Arthur faced in writing up an official peace agreement with the druids. Arthur, not knowing what else to do or say, had let him do it all, thinking Merlin might calm his need for distraction once they arrived. Arthur still wasn’t completely sure he had but Merlin had definitely fallen into a sullen silence. These were the first words Merlin was speaking to him in two days.

“Merlin, are you… _doing_ alright?” Arthur forced out, feeling out of step.

“No,” Merlin answered, “I’m not.” The words weren’t sharp, or hurt, or mocking, or angry. They were plain. Hollow. Not Merlin. It only had Arthur feeling worse, numbness creeping into his limbs that couldn’t completely come from standing in the snow.

“I… that is,” he had been about to say ‘understand’ but Arthur couldn’t say it without feeling like it was a lie and the last thing he wanted to do was lie to Merlin. When people had consoled him after Uther’s death, Merlin hadn’t bothered to _understand_ him and it wouldn’t have helped if he had tried. The home-cooked breakfast Merlin made for him all that following week had been more healing than any words of sympathy his friend could have offered. Arthur wanted to do the same for Merlin now, except he still couldn’t cook and it stupidly made him feel like he couldn’t do anything.

“Do you think you…” _Why_ couldn’t he stop stumbling? “ _Will_ you be alright?”

Merlin shuffled on his feet a bit, still looking at the ground and wrapped his arms around his torso in the saddest self-hug Arthur had ever seen. At length, he shook his head saying, “I don’t know.”

Arthur shook his head too. “That’s not what I wanted to hear,” he mumbled, mentally kicking himself for being such a disappointing friend.

Merlin heard him and snorted without humour. He asked, a little curious, “What did you want to hear?”

It was a fair question and Arthur didn’t have a good answer. He didn’t know what he wanted Merlin to tell him other than he was alright. But Merlin so clearly _wasn’t_ alright and the last thing Arthur wanted was for Merlin to lie for his benefit. So when he opened his mouth what came out was, “A list of what you need.”

They both froze. Arthur wasn’t sure he had meant to confess to it but now that he had voiced it, he found that it was true. A list of Merlin’s needs was exactly what he needed – a checklist, a task, a quest. Commands he could follow and items he could find and monsters he could slay. Friends he could rescue. Glancing up, Arthur saw that Merlin was _finally_ looking at him and it gave him the courage to give word to his feelings.

“Merlin, I need… to know what you need. I need you to tell me what good I can be towards you so that I can just go and _be_ good for you but… At the same time, I _can’t_ ask you about it because I am the most powerful man in Camelot and I know that might not be enough. I am terrified that you will ask something of me I cannot do or cannot grant and there is nothing I would refuse you, Merlin, _nothing_.”

Gods above, this was all coming out so wrong. His feelings were a maelstrom and he wasn’t even the one of them in mourning. Arthur was reminded of why he took pains to avoid talks of this nature because he _couldn’t seem to stop_ now that he’d started.

“I don’t want you to ask for the impossible. I don’t want to fail you in this – I _can’t_ fail you in this. But everything I am just feels… so inadequate! I – Merlin, I don’t know how to make you alright the way you did for me.”

Merlin’s eyes weren’t lacklustre anymore, they were shining and becoming bloodshot. His face wasn’t quite so blue anymore but blotchy with an increased blood flow. Merlin looked like he would crack apart at any moment and Arthur hated himself – he loathed himself because _he had done this_ to his friend.

Angrier than ever, Arthur turned to stomp away when Merlin opened cracked lips and whispered, “You are such a prat.”

Arthur was stunned.

“It figures,” Merlin went on, a little louder, a lot shakier, “my own mother dies and you manage to make it all about you.”

“No! _No!_ Merlin, that is the _last_ thing I-”

“I haven’t asked you for anything because I don’t know what to ask for…” Fingers clutched and bunched his tunic, breath escaped him like a soul abandoning a corpse. Then tears began to fall and Merlin just exploded.

“My mother is **dead** , Arthur! She’s dead!” A sudden wind started blowing, chilled with a cloying winter and strong enough Arthur worried it might blow Merlin over or blind him with snow but Merlin didn’t appear to notice. “She died _here_ , alone in a blizzard when no one else could go looking for her and _I wasn’t here for her_. How am I supposed to reconcile that, Arthur?! How am I supposed to understand that she has been dead for three months? How am I supposed to forgive myself for keeping warm inside the castle when the winter fell enough snow to block messengers between the kingdoms? Do you know I sent her letters? I sent letters _to a dead woman,_ Arthur and I. Didn’t. Know!”

Arthur hadn’t known either. The past winter had been unusually heavy and Arthur knew there would be casualties – once spring and the thaw had started, he got reports on decreased village populations nearly every morning. But he hadn’t known the snows had reached beyond Camelot. He hadn’t even thought they might.

The wind grew stronger.

“You said you were scared of failing me? Well I failed her, Arthur. That’s already happened! And if… if I –” his breath hitched in a sob and Arthur couldn’t stand the distance between them anymore. While Merlin continued to sob and spill his heart out, Arthur fought the wind to wrap his arms around his friend, trying with all his might to keep him held together. “If I failed my own mother,” Merlin cried, “how can I expect to succeed in protecting _you_? Or – or Gwen? Or Gaius or Gwaine or anyone else I care about? They’re all _dying_ because I’m not enough! I don’t want you to be next!”

“I won’t be,” Arthur tightened his grip, not understanding but determined to hush Merlin out of the self-destructive vortex he was creating. “I know you, Merlin, and you are strong and brave enough to make sure of that.”

“I’m not,” Merlin shook his head, distressed. “You’ve come so close to death so many times and it’s never easier to pull you back, you _selfish_ prat.”

“Well, I’ll work on keeping myself safe too. It ought to be enough if we work together, don’t you think?”

Merlin was quiet for a few minutes, his breath still hitching but his hysteria passing. The wind also passed, slower than it had appeared, as though Merlin were the reason it blew in the first place. Finally, Merlin’s shoulders slumped. He let out a heavy breath and mumbled, “I doubt it. Your pigheadedness is bound to be too much for even the both of us.”

Arthur tried not to laugh. Instead he cried, hiding silent tears in Merlin’s shoulder, praying to every god he knew that they could be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Arthur's point of view is harder to write and I don't understand. Maybe he was out of character?
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
